Moving healthcare data to the cloud

As of 2023, Estonian Health Insurance Fund (Tervisekassa/EHIF) insures 1,275,311 people in Estonia and abroad. The main task of the Health Insurance Fund is to organize national health insurance to provide insured people with access to necessary healthcare services, medicines, medical equipment and cash benefits.

Because of the increased pressure by COVID-19 on healthcare services and as EHIFs current systems were becoming outdated and prone to errors a strategic decision had to be made – purchase new equipment and carry on the same way or be a trailblazer and move to a completely new as a Service approach and leverage the power of Microsoft Azure.

“The challenges we are facing are twofold,” explains Karl Henrik Peterson, CDTO,
Executive Board, Estonian Health Insurance Fund. “First of all, the aging population means that every person that is employed in the health care sector must perform more. And the other part is to make our finances sustainable to cover the services we provide. The only way to do this rapidly is to scale out the organization towards innovation using
the cloud.”

The solution for the EHIF service landscape involved migration to SAP S/4HANA and
changing infrastructure to Microsoft Azure cloud by using two Azure availability zones working together as active/active and a new data center located in Estonia as a disaster
recovery solution.

Fujitsu delivered this as a fully managed ongoing service. “Fujitsu had all the necessary
security certifications and the long partnership with Microsoft, so we trusted them to get the job done,” Jüri-August Kirch, IT Manager, Estonian Health Insurance Fund explains. “By leveraging Fujitsu’s local and global teams to plan out and build the initial solution we collaborated closely with Microsoft’s regional and global team to verify and optimize every step of the Azure technical landscape to best fit and suit our needs.”

By moving to the cloud, EHIF can support the health of Estonian citizens all around the
world by providing highly available and scalable services that are up and running 24/7.
“If a person goes anywhere in Estonia to a pharmacy, then their digital prescription is
accessible to that pharmacist,” Karl Henrik Peterson says, “on top of that, we have the data on their insurance status, so the hospital knows they are covered.”

“After running half a year on cloud, we are achieving about triple the innovation rate that we used to do just two or three years ago,” explains Karl Henrik Peterson. “And we are now running our systems in dif ferent countries with live data and with production systems and this gives us the opportunity to maneuver our workloads to where we need them.”

Azure ExpressRoute is used to guarantee the consistent responsiveness of the system and the integrity of the data transferred. The standardization of the new deployment and scalability of the cloud will help EHIFs Test & Dev teams to plan & build new agile systems to help stimulate the innovation of the Estonian health sector landscape.